This paper investigates whether OECD countries are facing secular stagnation. Secular stagnation is defined as a situation when policy interest rates bounded at zero fail to stimulate demand sufficiently, due to low or negative neutral real interest rates and low inflation, and when ensuing...

Using Italian data that includes both inflation forecasts of firms and external information on their balance sheets, we study the causal effect of changes in the dispersion of beliefs about future inflation on the misallocation of resources. We find that as disagreement increases, so does...

Using randomized control trials (RCTs) applied over time in different countries, we study how the economic environment affects how agents learn from new information. We show that as inflation has recently risen in advanced economies, both households and firms have become more attentive and...

We document the decline in market power of the U.K. in safe assets and quantify the resulting losses. We estimate an increasing elasticity of demand for U.K. public debt during the latter half of the 20th century. This is in sharp contrast to the U.S., which displays the opposite pattern with...

We document the rise of China in offshore capital markets. Chinese firms use global tax havens to access foreign capital both in equity and bond markets. In the last twenty years, China's presence went from raising a negligible amount of capital in these markets to accounting for more than half...

The US government is the dominant supplier of global safe assets and faces a downward-sloping demand for its debt. In this paper, we ask if the US exercises its market power when issuing debt and study its macroeconomic consequences. We develop a model of the global economy in which US public...

We survey the literature on global capital allocation. We begin by reviewing the rise of cross-border investment, the shift towards portfolio investment, and the literature focusing on aggregate patterns in multilateral and bilateral positions. We then turn to the recent literature that uses...

We explore the consequences of global capital market segmentation by currency for the optimal currency composition of borrowing by firms. Global bond portfolios are driven by the currency of denomination of assets as investors prefer to lend in their home currency or the international currency,...

We empirically characterize how China is internationalizing the Renminbi by selectively opening up its domestic bond market to foreign investors and propose a dynamic reputation model to explain this internationalization strategy. The Chinese government deliberately controlled the entry of...

The set of monetary policy instruments has expanded since the start of the global financial crisis in the many OECD economies. Against this background, this paper analyses whether some of the new instruments should be retained in the long term when broader financial stability objectives are...